New Cambridge Analytica Leak Reveals A Lot More About Global Manipulation

A new trove of over 100,000 documents related to the defunct Cambridge Analytica has started to leak online via the Twitter handle @HindsightFiles. According to The Guardian, the documents first surfaced on New Year’s day; they are revealing information about how the firm operated in over 68 countries and manipulated voters on ‘an industrial scale.’

With that said, the documents make it obvious that what we saw during the initial days of the Facebook CA scandal was just the tip of the iceberg. Facebook faced a lot of flak across the globe after the data of over 87 million users was harvested by Cambridge Analytica and used it to manipulate the 2016 elections.

As per the reports, leaked documents have been sourced from the email accounts and hard drive of ex-Cambridge Analytica employee Brittany Kaiser.

While the documents provide better insights on past workings of the firm, it can also help experts analyze what bad things are on the way for future elections. This is an important time as the 2020 US Presidential elections are on the way.

It’s known that Cambridge Analytica was working with a political party in Ukraine in 2017 while Robert Mueller was investigating the firm.

“There are emails between these major Trump donors discussing ways of obscuring the source of their donations through a series of different financial vehicles. These documents expose the entire dark money machinery behind US politics,” says Kaiser. According to her, the same process of converting black money to white was followed in other regions where Cambridge Analytica operated.

Speaking of the bigger picture, it isn’t just about one company that got caught and had to shut down. Christopher Steele, ex-MI 6 agent, has warned that authorities have failed to punish the bad actors, and this would pave the road for more even more sophisticated actors.

Bard College research associate Emma Briant got access to some of the documents. After analyzing them, she said there is evidence of “disturbing experiments on American voters, manipulating them with fear-based messaging, targeting the most vulnerable, that seems to be continuing.”

The entire dump of Cambridge Analytica documents will be released over the next few months.

Aditya likes to cover topics related to Microsoft, Windows 10, and interesting gadgets. But when he is not working, you can find him binge-watching random videos on YouTube (after he has wasted an hour on Netflix trying to find a good show).
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